How “Fire Fungi” Help Put Burnt Landscapes Back Together

How “Fire Fungi” Help Put Burnt Landscapes Back Together 03.12.2026 | Discoveries , News , Wild Life Discoveries 03.12.2026 How “Fire Fungi” Help Put Burnt Landscapes Back Together Before plants and animals recolonize after a wildfire, fungi get to work. Story by Hannah Thomasy Share Ecologists have long studied how life returns after a devastating wildfire. In British Columbia forests, for instance, wildflowers, such as fireweed, and grasses are often the first plants to poke through the charred soil . Shrubs come next, then seedlings like aspens and willows. Animals also trickle in: Woodpeckers feast on the insects hiding in dead trees, while deer and elk devour tender shoots and berry-laden shrubs. Yet in the grand succession of life after a wildfire, the first beings to appear are neither plants nor animals, but fungi. Species of pyrophilous fungi—from Greek for “fire-loving”—thrive in the burned terrain. Just weeks after a blaze tears through a landscape, swaths of fungal fruiting bodies emerge from the soil to release spores, briefly dominating the otherwise-barren surface. “A lot of them make little, teeny-tiny, adorable, all-colors-of-the-rainbow cups,” says Monika Fischer , a mycologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. These fire fungi carpet the recently scorched earth with splashes of warm ocher, deep mauve, fleshy pink, and bright orange. Now, Fischer and other researchers are updating the ecological succession playbook, studying these fungi up close to find out exactly what they are and what they’re capable of. “They really seem like the first responders,” says Fischer. “They’re the things that are growing the most rapidly first.” So, whatever these fungi are up to—biologically speaking—likely impacts the rest of post-fire succession and recovery, she says. Relatively little is known about these fire-loving fungi. Many do not have common names, and many more species are likely still awaiting identification. Nevertheless, researchers believe pyrophilous fungi have an important role to play in a world that is increasingly prone to severe wildfires . As well as killing or driving off most of the life in an ecosystem, high-intensity wildfires, which can reach temperatures over 1,000 degrees Celsius ( 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit ), leave behind a landscape that is largely inhospitable to new growth. “In an extreme forest fire, the top layer of soil and stuff basically burns—along with any organisms that are in there—and turns into pyrolyzed organic material,” says Matt Traxler , a microbiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who oversaw some of Fischer’s previous work. Pyrolyzed organic material, essentially soot and charcoal, is mostly carbon, but it’s not in a form that’s easy for organisms to use, Traxler says. The carbon atoms form rings, which are then fused together into complicated clumps. “Very few microbes—or very few organisms—could just take that in to try to eat it,” he says. This burned substance